There's No Place Like Home

When we arrived home late Thursday night from our trip I felt like I had just arrived on vacation!  For years, I’ve been the person who said, “If it weren’t for the kids and grandsons, I could gladly give up permanent digs and just roam the world for the rest of my life.”  Yet, this time, after only about 25 days away, I was anxious to be home.  Well, this was a surprise!

I started thinking about “home.”  Of course, it has different meanings for many, and I can only address my own, but what I’ve concluded is that “home” evolves.  Here’s how:

As a child, home meant Lake Avenue, seven people at the dinner table, birthdays with a favorite aunt and uncle, warm Christmas eves, one bathroom, sharing a bedroom, and the freedom to roam our small town in the summer.

As a teen-ager, home meant being answerable to annoying parents on Lake Avenue, missing brothers who were in the service, missing an older sister who had moved to North Jersey, babysitting a little sister, having my own room and my own phone and four around the big table at dinner.

As a young adult, married and living in Ohio, home still meant Lake Avenue.  We would go “home” every long weekend for years.  We would go “home” every Christmas.  Our apartment, even after the birth of our daughter, wasn’t “home” to me, I guess.

This went on for years.  Of course, I recognized that our houses were homes, especially the one in which we raised our two children.  For my kids, this was “home” and, though I really, truly thought of them as home, I continued to say “we’re going home” whenever we were headed to New Jersey.

My parents sold the home I grew up in and moved to Florida in 1981, shortly after marrying off the last of us.  I was appalled.  I’d been gone for ten years, yet I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that Lake Avenue would no longer be “home.”  I remember my daughter asking me why I was upset.  This 9-year old, to whom home was Melwood Drive in Columbus, couldn’t understand how I thought of an old house in New Jersey as “home.”  She was right, and from that point on, where I lived with my husband, children and dogs, was home.

Several houses later, “home” has now morphed into another iteration.  Our present home is not as large as previous places, we’ve not as much property (in fact, a postage-stamp front yard) and the last piece of new furniture I bought was I-don’t-know-how-long-ago.  The days (years) of collecting the perfect pieces for each room are long over (embarrassing confession:  I bought a yellow striped velvet couch during the early 1970s “Mediterranean” phase).  I now have confidence in my own personal style.  Walking through the door Thursday night and seeing the things we loved enough to keep sitting companionably on bookshelves; climbing the stairs to the bedroom we carefully refined over the years, I knew I was home. 

True, we raised our kids in another home, cared for and said good-bye to a parent in another, prepared for a child’s wedding in a third and welcomed grandchildren to still another.  Momentous occasions all that should, by definition, be recalled as true “homes.” And, at the time, they each were.

But this place we are in now is definitely home.  Just the hub and I on a full-time basis but imbued with all the bits and pieces of our previous homes and re-animated as in earlier homes when family and friends gather here. 

It’s a cliché, I know, but home really is "where the heart is.”   Our hearts just define it differently at various stages of our lives.  At least, that’s the way I see it.

1962 on Lake Avenue. L-R: Mom, Collene,
Melaney, Jackie

50 years later.  2012 on Grand Strand Drive